General Laptop question

Looking to get a new one, as it has been 8 years. I see the Sagers I am looking at have Slot 1 M2.Sata/PCIe or you can choose PCIe only.
Then it has Slot 2 M.2 PCIe, and finally Storage.
Is slot acting as Windows C drive, for programs and OS?
What is Slot 2 and then storage? Is storage like the optical drive, but now used with flash drive to just store exra data?
I would love to just put an optical drive as I still use them.
ANyways, any tutorial or guidance is appreciated..

 

The "storage" you're referring to is likely an empty 2.5-inch drive bay that would be used for a hard drive or SSD, not an optical drive. Very few laptops nowadays have them. A few lower-cost Dell and HP machines do, but there's nothing in the enthusiast space from those brands, Asus, Acer, Sager/Clevo, etc.

 

How you arrange your storage is your choice. Convention is slot 1 is a fast 'boot' drive with operating system on volume c:/, then slower but bigger data storage drive either as a 2.5" or second M. 2, but it's your choice. You could have your os on a hard disk in the 2.5" bay partitioned into w:/, x:/, y:/ and z:/ if you wished. If you have raid support, you could join the two M.2's and have them appear as one superspeed volume.

 

Like others have said, the 2 M.2 slots are for SSD cards, while the "storage" is a 2.5 drive. The M.2 slots are generally used for the faster NVMe M.2 SSDs for the OS (and other programs that could benefit from it), but you can get SATA M.2 drives as well. The 2.5" will take either a HDD, or a SATA SSD.

Any combo will work fine, but most laptops come standard with a small NVMe SSD in slot 1, and larger HDD or SDD in the 2.5" for storage.

I ordered mine with all three empty to save money, since I had an SSD to put in the 2.5" already, and will just put an NVMe in slot 1 myself later.

 

Thanks. So if, the slot one has the OS etc, I can make the storage elsewhere. I dont have to have slot one, then a slot two and storage. I can have a slot one with 250gb or 500gb NVMe SSD and then a storage... Otherwise is it seems I am will end up with 3 places to put data?

 

Doesn't matter which one or combination you use. They're just different interfaces that accomplish the same thing (data read/write).

Right now I just have a 2.5 drive, with neither of the M.2 slots filled.

 

Thnx

 

I put new SSD WD Blue 500gb hardrive after cloning it from my original HDD drive..
Boots up and operates much faster.
But, it uses more RAM, CPU and runs hotter.
About 20F idle hotter, which is about 135-140.
CPU 5 to 12%
RAM 3 gb. Just idling.
Fan pathway is clear, as I vacuum it monthly, and just checked it prior to posting.
I use some Thermal IC chip stuff on cpu that xoticpc put on there, and it was replaced last year.
All of these issues, if they are issues, are right after installing SSD.

 

Yeah, these are issues if your workload didn't change (worse if you're just reporting

stats​

while idle...).

Biggest issue? Cloning the original HDD with all the accumulated junk over the years.

Clean O/S install is always highly recommended along with only the necessary (stable) drivers and current programs you now use.